I was skeptical when these were first given to me. Now I don't know how I managed to keep fruit and vegetables fresh before. I have purchased these as gifts and Christmas stocking stuffers for family and friends.

I would definitely recommend FreshPaper. I have no idea how it works, but it does work! I have noticed it makes a big difference with strawberries, spinach and most especially with spring mix lettuce that has red lettuce in it. I will not buy spring mix if I don't have FreshPaper in the house because the red lettuce gets so disgusting black and slimy really fast. I put this in the clam shell and it keeps it fresh. Also crucial with raspberries, which I find turn almost as soon as I get them home from the store. I won't buy raspberries unless I have this in the house. When the carton is empty, I put the FreshPaper loose in the veggie drawer for the other veggies in there. I have had to buy FreshPaper at WholeFoods; it's nice to be able to get it on Amazon!

This product has a pleasant, spicy scent. While I enjoy it, I was worried that it would end up making my fruit and vegetables smell funny. I am happy to report that the scent doesn’t transfer at all. Thanks to a lack of marital communication, I unintentionally did a test of this product and have evidence that it works. Recently my husband and I each came home with bags of apples. I put mine in a fruit bowl lined with a sheet of Freshpaper, he put his in a separate bowl. While my family of three loves apples, it took us a while to eat up our combined purchases. Over that time, the apples in the Freshpaper bowl stayed fresh. Several of the other apples got mushy and had to be thrown away. It’s helped extend the life of vegetables in my crisper drawer, also. I can’t wait for farmer’s market season to begin so I can load up on goodies with no fear of waste!

I turn almost everything fresh into Penicillin in my fridge. I don't mean to and I always feel bad about it, but I just don't get to my fruits and veggies fast enough. I found this product and wasn't sure if it would do the trick in helping me preserve my groceries. I was going to just start vacuum sealing my (almost) gone produce, but who really has time for that and this was such a cheap solution if it worked. Well, I am here to say that it definitely works and I definitely get A LOT more time to use the stuff I was rotting before. I use it two ways - underneath a tray of strawberries I always get at Costco (and they don't grow hair or any kind of fuzz because of it), and also in the fridge drawers. One sheet usually lasts about 3 or 4 weeks, maybe longer if I forget to change it, but it is DEFINITELY buying me time to not waste food.

Fresh Paper really works to keep fruits and veggies fresh longer! I put the sheets EVERYWHERE...counter top fruit bowl, fridge drawers and inside berry containers and the large bags of lettuce and greens from Costco. I love that 1 sheet or half a sheet keeps a whole bowl fresh, doesn't need to be in direct contact with the fruit. Especially love it for BANANAS, since I like mine on the green side. Now I can buy large bunches of bananas and enjoy them before they turn brown.

I'm so glad to know that Amazon now carries Fresh Paper! We are huge berry eaters and really rely on Fresh Paper to keep our berries fresher longer. Gone are the days of moldy strawberries! I cut a sheet in half and stick it in my strawberry clamshell or use a whole sheet in my crisper drawer. We also have a garden and are sometimes overrun with one particular veggie. It's pretty fantastic to know that with Fresh Paper you don't have to eat all the zucchini in one week!

By no means will these stop decay from happening but it slows down the appearance of mold on fruits and seems to keep our baby spinach fresh and crisp longer. I buy produce in bulk at Sams Club because they have some of the best tasting produce around town and at affordable prices. However, we are only a family of three and the produce will often start to show signs of decay before we can finish the container. These papers have made it so that we can finish off the food before it goes bad.

Indeed, money — and the difficulty women have borrowing and raising it — was the recurring theme among the audience and speakers that also included Small Business Administration head Maria Contreras-Sweet, Georgetown Cupcake founders Katherine Kallinis Berman and Sophie Kallinis LaMontagne, Personal Independence Trust chair Nell Merlino, and Katherine Jollon Colsher, national Director of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses

Before joining SBA, Contreras-Sweet founded three of her own small business, including a community bank in California and a private equity firm. She said her frustration with the banking systems is what led her to start her own. She would gather women and say to them, “You always tell me you’re frustrated with our own institutions. We need to build ownership. So let’s get together and build a bank of our own.”

The Georgetown Cupcake sisters said no’s and shut-doors were common when they started their first brick-and-mortar shop in 2008, a Georgetown suite smaller than their current Georgetown location.

“[Banks] were skeptical,” said LaMontagne. “Most of the bankers we met with were male.”

Shukla, whose company is called Fenugreen, filed for a patent when she was a senior in high school. Her goal was to get her paper to people in Africa and India who, like her grandmother, didn’t have access to refrigeration.

That was when she started going to the farmers market. “Frankly, the money made a big difference. It funded our first production facility. It funded our ability to get into Whole Foods. It funded us getting out of my apartment,” she said..."

When I was a kid, the future promised all kinds of whiz-bang technologies. Jet boots. Robot maids, like on “The Jetsons.” And, most exciting for a 12-year-old with a subscription to Gourmet magazine, “smart” refrigerators that performed tricks like alerting you to eat that lettuce in the back of the produce drawer before it spoiled and went to waste.

Smart refrigerators finally do exist. (Sadly, I’m still waiting for jet boots.) For about $4,000, I can have a fridge that generates recipes based on what’s on the shelves and tells me when I’m out of milk. But no matter how smart the appliance is, it still cannot warn me when those pricey strawberries from the farmers market are about to get moldy or when that bunch of cilantro is about to turn black. Nor will it be able to assuage my guilt for forgetting about them and wasting food.

Happily, there is a better, low-tech solution to that problem: FreshPaper, which looks like small, square paper towels. They are infused with a mixture of organic spices and botanicals that inhibit bacterial and fungal growth and extend the life of quickly perishable produce. One sheet of maple-scented FreshPaper helped my basket of very ripe strawberries last more than a week in the fridge. A sheet tossed into a plastic bag with cilantro helped the herb last about 10 days.

FreshPaper doesn’t blink or beep, but I’m not complaining. Its power is in its simplicity — and its price. Each 5-by-5-inch sheet, manufactured in Massachusetts, costs 50 cents. Sheets can be used and reused over the course of two or three weeks and then composted.

Like many useful inventions, the idea for FreshPaper began by happenstance. Kavita Shukla, then a student at Burleigh Manor Middle School in Ellicott City, was visiting relatives in India and swallowed some water while brushing her teeth. Immediately, she began to worry that she would get sick to her stomach. But her grandmother made her a spice tea from an old family recipe, and Shukla avoided illness. Soon, she began to wonder what else this magic formula could do.

If Shukla, now 27 and living in Cambridge, Mass., were like most of us, the story would end there. But she was a determined teenager with a talent for invention. She received her first patent at 13 for a product called Smart Lid. Inspired by her mother, who regularly forgot to screw on the gas cap on her car, the lid beeped when a container or jar was left open.

In high school, Shukla began to look in earnest for practical applications for her grandmother’s special tea. (“As a kid,” Shukla says with a laugh, “I couldn’t test for stomach ailments, except on myself.”) She found it one day at the grocery store when her mother asked her to pick out a pint of strawberries. Many of the baskets had berries that were already going bad. Would dipping the berries in her spice mixture help them stay “healthy”?

It did. And it seemed to work for other fruits and vegetables as well. At 17, Shukla was awarded her second patent.

Shukla thought her invention would be best used in developing countries, where many people lack refrigeration and a lot of produce spoils between the farm and the table. While studying at Harvard — where else would a young woman with two patents on her résumé end up? — she considered starting a nonprofit organization to promote the product. But, she says, “I didn’t really understand how difficult it would be to distribute something, even if you were giving it away for free.” For several years, she put her plans aside.

Then, in 2010, Shukla decided to market her product closer to home, in the United States. She began to visit farmers markets and street fairs in Boston. As she talked to potential customers, she heard stories of frustration about tomatoes and greens thrown in the trash and families skipping fresh produce for fear that it would go bad before they used it. Food spoilage and waste, Shukla realized, were big problems everywhere.

That’s an understatement. Accord​ing to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, approximately one-third of food, about 1.3 billion tons, is lost or wasted annually. American and European consumers toss out between 210 to 250 pounds of food per person each year. A study at the University of Arizona at Tucson in 2004 estimated that household food waste in the United States alone adds up to $43 billion each year.

And so, a decade after receiving her patent, Shukla founded Fenugreen along with a friend, Swaroop Samant. (The company’s name is a play on fenugreek, one of FreshPaper’s main ingredients.) Their first customer was Harvest Co-op in Cambridge, which agreed to sell the product after performing its own semi-scientific experiment. Chris Durkin, the director of membership and community relations, bought two baskets of blueberries and left them unrefrigerated. The berries without FreshPaper shriveled within

three days and grew moldy by day five. The ones with FreshPaper nestled at the bottom of the basket stayed fresh. “I tend to be a bit of a cynic,” Durkin says. “So I was pretty excited when it worked. This is a low-cost, low-environmental-footprint solution to help fresh food to last longer.”

Fans of FreshPaper have likened it to “dryer sheets for produce,” according to Shukla, as they toss them in the vegetable drawer, a fruit bowl or a cardboard berry box. And they say FreshPaper saves them money. “I have not thrown out a single carton of berries since I started using it,” raved Joan Popolo, a customer in Carlisle, Mass.

It also alleviates the guilt of wasting food. Denis Healy, the director of development for the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, uses FreshPaper regularly to extend the life of mushrooms, broccoli and green beans. “I hate to waste,” he says. “You put all this time in shopping for the best things you can find, and if you don’t eat it right away it goes bad.”

Washington area consumers will get their first glimpse of FreshPaper this weekend, when Shukla and Samant will be selling it at the FreshFarm Markets in Silver Spring on Saturday and in Dupont Circle on Sunday. (Fenugreen will donate proceeds of its sales to the markets’ Matching Dollars Program for nutrition assistance.) Farm 2 Family’s mobile farm stand will carry FreshPaper starting this week at Eastern Market and at the Maret School, and at the Farm to Family Market in Richmond.

Shukla remains determined to make FreshPaper available where it is most sorely needed. To that end, she is working to introduce the product to farmers and distributors who might use it during harvest and shipping (with customized paper sizes). Later this year, Shukla is launching a “buy-one, give-one” program in which, for every package of FreshPaper that is sold, Fenugreen will donate a package to food banks or nonprofits in less-economically developed countries.

“We started Fenugreen as a social enterprise,” she says. “We still believe that in areas where there is no access to refrigeration for farmers and consumers, it can be life- changing.” Smarter than even the smartest technology.

Black, a former Food section staffer based in Brooklyn, writes Smarter Food monthly. Follow her on Twitter: @jane_black. Shukla will join today’s Free Range chat at noon at live.washingtonpost.com.

"Liked it so much I am sending some out to friends to try out and to a young woman who is a gourmet cook and wine connoisseur and gets paid for her knowledge... she is my best friends son's girl friend... Save your veggies and fruits so you can enjoy without wasting them..."

A MIRACLE

"I cannot stand my fruits or veggies that I purchase going bad in 2 days:-( I'm not rich and I try to eat well... These Fresh Paper are the most amazing creation... I had been using another product that worked well but you had to follow specific instructions and with these fresh papers its a no brainier:-) Thank You for sharing the family secret:-)"

GREAT PRODUCT FOR A GREAT PRICE.

"I get a lot of produce at the grocery, and it's so easy for it to go bad quickly once you get it home. I cook for myself, so the longer the produce can last, the better. I just put one of these sheets in any container of produce I get, or my refrigerated produce drawers or the fruit basket on my counter, and these sheets keep my food fresher longer, no doubt."

GOOD PRODUCT

"I love the fresh papers and they do their job in extending the life of fruits and veggies. Very easy to use."

GREAT PRODUCT

These simple sheets keep all my fruits and vegetables fresher longer. I have saved a lot of money using them consistently. I never want "to be without them."